Flutterby™! From 2018-03-01 to 2018-03-31

Up-Cycled Flamingo Lawn Dragons. The Flamingo Incognito Etsy shop.

[ related topics: Pedal Power ]

With Lumber in Short Supply, Record Wood Costs Are Set to Juice Home Prices

Builders say the higher lumber costs are making homes more expensive. Lumber prices started rising last year after fires destroyed prime forests and a trade dispute between the U.S. and Canada restricted supplies. Now a shortage of railcars and trucks is forcing builders to pay even more.

I was wondering why a 2x4 was up over $4, I thought it was just the local fires, but....

[ related topics: Machinery Woodworking ]

Excerpt from Tit Bits magazine, 1892:

The Husband: "You're not economical."

The Wife: "Well, if you don't call a woman who saves her wedding dress for a possible second marriage, I'd like to know what you think economy is."

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology Economics Marriage ]

Just saw a site with 5 identical copies of the same video add, all playing slightly out of sync. Wonder if that counted as 5 impressions to the advertiser's bill?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Consumerism and advertising Video Woodworking ]

The owner of the "Internet Research Agency", indicted by Robert Mueller for all of those troll accounts on social media, is also the owner of the mercenary army that attacked US forces in Syria. Putin ally said to be in touch with Kremlin, Assad before his mercenaries attacked U.S. troops

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Net Culture ]

Holy shit: Akamai: memcached-fueled 1.3 TBPS attacks.

On February 27th, Akamai and other companies announced the discovery of a newly observed reflection and amplification vector, memcached. This service is meant to cache data and reduce the strain caused by memory intensive services. Memcached can have both UDP and TCP listeners and requires no authentication. Since UDP is easily spoofable, it makes this service vulnerable to use as a reflector. Worse, memcached can have an amplification factor of over 50,000, meaning a 203 byte request results in a 100 megabyte response.

[ related topics: Graphics Mathematics ]

EFF: State Lawmakers Want to Block Pornography at the Expense of Your Free Speech, Privacy, and Hard-Earned Cash:

The gist of the model legislation is this: Device manufacturers would be forced to install "obscenity filters" on cell phones, tablets, computers, and any other Internet- connected devices. Those filters could only be removed if consumers pay a $20 fee. In addition to violating the First Amendment and burdening consumers and businesses, this would allow the government to intrude into consumers’ private lives and restrict their control over their own devices.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Free Speech moron Consumerism and advertising Civil Liberties Net Culture ]

Looks like a reason to increase NRA membership! (And probably why my gun enthusiast friends are GOA members instead...): Harvard Medical School: A Surprising Safety Benefit — Firearm injuries drop during NRA conventions, research shows.

Various reprints of the press release:

• Gun injuries fall during NRA conventions, study says
• All Talk, No Bolt-Action: Gun Injuries Drop During NRA Conventions
• Firearm-related injuries drop during NRA conventions

The paper is a letter to NEJM, all the usual caveats apply: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1712773

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health Current Events Television Guns Fabrication ]

So I just saw this juxtaposition and suddenly wondered: how did Michael get in and out of KITT when they were in the semi trailer?

[ related topics: Photography Woodworking ]

Too lazy to run to the store for something to put cheese on.

Too lazy to run to the store for something to put cheese on. Take 2, with picture.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Easter falls on April 1st this year, which means: Jesus Fools Day! http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp03022018.shtml

[ related topics: Religion Humor Nature and environment ]

• NPR: Uber, Lyft Drivers Earning A Median Profit Of $3.37 Per Hour, Study Says
• The Guardian: Uber and Lyft drivers' median hourly wage is just $3.37, report finds
• Inc: Uber's New CEO Faces New PR Disaster: MIT Study Reveals Drivers Make Less Than $3.37 an Hour — Your side hustle may be costing you big time.

MIT Center for Environmental and Policy Research: Research Brief: The Economics of Ride Hailing: Driver Revenue, Expenses and Taxes (PDF)

From this Sensible Endowment post.

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Economics Government ]

Andre Shakti: What It's Like to Date When You're a Porn Star

There are a few rules for dating a sex worker: don't compromise their cash flow by driving away their business, never out them to other people without their consent, and don't expect them to eagerly perform activities they normally get paid to do for free. ...

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Space & Astronomy Current Events Aviation - Helicopters ]

Brooklyn man wins nearly $1M lawsuit after NYPD cop tried to frame him on DWI charge. NYPD cop blows through stop sign in marked SUV, hits this guy, tries to frame him for DUI. EMTs reported no signs of intoxication, hospital took blood found nothing.

Officers involved are still employed by the NYPD.

[ related topics: Humor Invention and Design New York ]

Frank Chimero: Everything Easy Is Hard Again. Some good writing on web design, HTML and CSS, in the era where it takes some unknown time longer than 4 hours for modern Firefox to render its start page on a basic Windows XP machine.

[ related topics: Ziffle Microsoft Writing Graphics Graphic Design ]

How not to run a CA. This in particular is about the recent failure of the Trustico certificate authority, but it's a really good reminder that you shouldn't rely solely on HTTPS for anything more important than banking.

Also, don't give your private keys to anyone.

This Twitter thread.... Apparently Trustico, for ease of customer use, generated the private keys. So in a contract dispute, their CEO emailed, in plain text, 23,000 private keys... And then made many conflicting and wrong statements.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

Doh, I accidentally put this under the NRA members and gun safety post, meant to put it here:

Related to that Harvard/NEJM thing yesterday which suggested that ~.1% of gun owners (NRA convention attendees) are linked to 20% of unintentional firearms injuries (probably because gun ranges are closed during that event), 30 day mortality risk is lower for patients admitted to teaching hospitals with acute myocardial infarction when the 2 big national cardiology meetings happen (mortality risk is the same for non-teaching hospitals):

Mortality and Treatment Patterns Among Patients Hospitalized With Acute Cardiovascular Conditions During Dates of National Cardiology Meetings

Conclusions and Relevance High-risk patients with heart failure and cardiac arrest hospitalized in teaching hospitals had lower 30-day mortality when admitted during dates of national cardiology meetings. High-risk patients with AMI admitted to teaching hospitals during meetings were less likely to receive PCI, without any mortality effect.

[ related topics: Guns Archival ]

Every set of young developers is determined to recreate the failures of their elders, in their own unique way. And their elders can only stand by and watch in horror, protecting their own code in as isolated a silo as possible.

[ related topics: Movies ]

Charlene was using egg whites for gluten free pancakes, and we had all these lemons... I haven't poached eggs in a while, my technique needs work.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Argh. Spent several hours today fighting and finding a bug introduced into Gcodetools by Inkscape 0.92.

Shadow posted this awesome and terrifying image of pedal powered utility transporation

[ related topics: Pedal Power ]

This Glorious Madman Stuffed A Tesla Drivetrain Into A 1981 Honda Accord. Used a Chevy Volt battery pack, the build ended up lighter than the original car 'cause various aluminum drivetrain parts from the Tesla were way way lighter than the '80s iron.

[ related topics: Automobiles ]

Computer latency: 1977-2017:

Almost every computer and mobile device that people buy today is slower than common models of computers from the 70s and 80s. Low-latency gaming desktops and the ipad pro can get into the same range as quick machines from thirty to forty years ago, but most off-the-shelf devices aren’t even close.

[ related topics: Games ]

Hmmm... 5 gallons of food safe hydraulic fluid would be backordered from the more local vendors. $25 more from Amazon, but similar delivery timeline and I don't have to drive to Santa Rosa to pick it up.

[ related topics: Books Food Bay Area ]

Internet Artists Invaded the MoMA With a Guerrilla Augmented Reality Exhibit.

MoMAR inaugural show ‘Hello, we’re from the internet’ (Vimeo video)

http://momar.gallery/

[ related topics: Art & Culture Net Culture Video ]

Monkeyuser - Focus (comic) (think this came by way of Meuon on Facebook).

Justin Murphy: Who’s afraid of free speech in the United States?. Communists have been flat since the late '90s, racists are on a downturn, but particularly interesting are the graphs that break it down by extremity of political opinion of the supporter/denier.

[ related topics: Politics Weblogs moron ]

The thing about housing policy is reading CBD as "central business district" and not "cannabidiol" (I live in Sonoma County) or "Christian Book Delivery" (top hit on Google).

[ related topics: Religion Books Theater & Plays Real Estate ]

A nice little run-down of how much of the current autonomy by liberal states and cities that conservatives are decrying draws strength from the states rights legal frameworks that spawned in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Donald Trump blames liberal judges for thwarting him on sanctuary cities. He should blame conservative lawyers instead.

But one group dissented from the prevailing view of federal-state relations. In the early 1980s, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies — at that time a ragtag collection of conservative and libertarian law students, professors, litigators and judges — began to push for a revival of the 10th Amendment and the attendant doctrine of state sovereignty. In 1982, the Federalist Society's first national conference featured several speeches arguing that power should be taken away from an overreaching federal government and given back to the states and local governments through the 10th Amendment. Speeches such as "The Revival of States' Rights" and "In the Beginning Are the States" decried the "suffocating" and destructive consequences of federal programs that put "coercive" conditions on the states. These speakers didn't see the relationship between federal government and the state as being "cooperative" relationships. Instead, they harped on the coercive elements of federal programs, arguing that they deprived states and local governments of autonomy and self-rule.

[ related topics: Politics Libertarian Books moron Law Current Events Civil Liberties Conferences ]

Everybody's talking about the Amazon Echo evil cackle, but let's face it, Philadelphia Toboggan Company did it better, 90 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiVh9jVKxug

[ related topics: Books Movies ]

"How come we doin' this?" "Well, why not?" "Well, they said it couldn't be done." "Well, that's the reason, son."

Bangert: End coming for Netflix, other streaming distractions during Purdue classes?

“I think it’s fair to say that probably, somewhere buried in there, there’s some academic work happening,” Daniels told faculty members. “But you’ll see, this is while someone is teaching. Generously defined, very few of the sites being visited, in the class period in those classrooms, were academic.”

Daniels said he wanted to get faculty thoughts: Was it time for a campuswide policy on browsing non-academic material while a class was in session?

Or they could, you know, ask the teachers to be engaging and relevant?

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment ]

Vision Zero is a failure; it’s time to Stop de Kindermoord

A few years ago in Toronto, after a child was killed in a nice upper middle class neighbourhood, these signs started appearing all over the city. With typical Canadian politeness, they say “Children playing, please slow down.” This isn’t good enough anymore. It should be reprinted to say “Slow the f**k down right now and don’t murder our children.”

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Heavily armed drug cops raid retiree’s garden, seize okra plants — Georgia police declare war on okra.

The Cannabis Eradication programs have historically inflated the size of their hauls by including non-psychoactive "ditchweed" in their totals of plants seized. In past years, ditchweed accounted for up to 98 percent of seized outdoor plant totals. According to the ONDCP, ditchweed still makes up an unspecified percent of outdoor plants seized.

This used to happen when I lived in Tennessee. Can we stop the stupid War On (some people who use some) Drugs already?

[ related topics: Drugs Health History Current Events Law Enforcement Chattanooga Gardening hubris ]

Citizen Lab: Bad Traffic — Sandvine’s PacketLogic Devices Used to Deploy Government Spyware in Turkey and Redirect Egyptian Users to Affiliate Ads?

<after an extensive investigation, we matched characteristics of the middleboxes in Turkey and Egypt to Sandvine PacketLogic devices. acquired Ontario-based networking equipment company Sandvine and combined the two companies in 2017. Francisco Partners has a number of investments in dual-use technology companies, including providers of Internet surveillance and monitoring tools such as NSO Group, an Israeli company that develops and sells mobile spyware. NSO Group’s spyware has been used in several countries to target journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders.

[ related topics: Food moron Current Events Journalism and Media Civil Liberties Net Culture Currency Birds Economics iPhone ]

Program in C (take-off on The Little Mermaid Under The Sea) (YouTube Video)

Via JWZ.

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Software Engineering Video ]

So apparently sanding drums on a RotoZip are a bad idea... I need a lower speed rotary tool with a 1/4" shank.

[ related topics: Music Photography ]

The Slingshot APT FAQ. A Windows exploit kit, in some cases installed via exploited Mikrotik routers, appears to have been part of targeted attacks in the Middle East and Africa from 2012 to the present. The code suggests that it's written by English speaking coders, and that:

The malicious samples investigated by the researchers were marked as ‘version 6.x’, which suggests the threat has existed for a considerable length of time. The development time, skill and cost involved in creating Slingshot’s complex toolset is likely to have been extremely high. Taken together, these clues suggest that the group behind Slingshot is likely to be highly organized and professional and probably state-sponsored.

[ related topics: Microsoft ]

Slate: Actually, Backpackers, You Don’t Need to Filter Your Stream Water

The outdoor community (and industry) has made filtration a must. But a look at the scientific evidence shows that this mandate rests on a shaky foundation.

I think there's a little trolling in the article, but probably worth considering if you're choosing between maintaining a comfortable hydration buffer running on the edge of dehydration to get back to civilization comfortably.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Television Sports Community ]

Sure, Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity, but have you considered how much Ansible uses vs a shell script every time a new server is provisioned?

[ related topics: Cool Science Invention and Design ]

Well given the current administration's admiration for Russia, this is gonna fuck NATO: Theresa May: ‘Highly likely’ Russia responsible for spy’s poisoning by nerve agent:

But in her remarks, May described a “reckless” and “indiscriminate” attack, which not only endangered the lives of its two principal victims, Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, but potentially exposed scores of others, including a police officer who remains hospitalized.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Law Enforcement ]

Rough JS, a JavaScript library for that rough sketched hand-drawn look.

[ related topics: Language Books ]

Etowah sheriff pockets $750k in jail food funds, buys $740k beach house.

Many Alabama sheriffs contend that the practice of keeping "excess" inmate-feeding funds for themselves is legal under a state law passed before World War II. Yet in a number of counties including Jefferson and Montgomery, any money allocated to sheriffs for feeding inmates that is not used for that purpose is instead turned over to the county government.

Entrekin reported on forms he filed with the Alabama Ethics Commission that he made "more than $250,000" each of the past three years via the inmate-feeding funds.

The self-driving truck craze has reminded me of "Smokey and the Bandit", and from that I've gotten to thinking about the whole "out of control sheriff as local dictator" concept that was so popular in '70s and '80s culture; action TV shows and movies of that era had vigilantes in the southwest protecting hapless citizens from out of control law enforcement. Maybe we gave up that trope in popular entertainment too soon?

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Ethics Nature and environment Food History moron Sociology Law Current Events Law Enforcement Television California Culture Machinery Currency Real Estate ]

ICE Spokesman Resigns, Saying He Could No Longer Spread Falsehoods for Trump Administration:

Mr. Schwab said in interviews, first with The San Francisco Chronicle and then with CNN, that he had been frustrated by the remarks, and had quit “because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts.”

[ related topics: Politics Bay Area California Culture ]

RT Eric Sprankle, PsyD @DrSprankle:

Don’t pathologize a sexual behavior when it’s the sexual behavior’s stigma that’s pathological.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture ]

APNewsBreak: [Montana Senate] Green Party candidate was on state GOP payroll

[ related topics: Politics ]

CNN: These are the victims of the Austin package bombings

(In case you've missed it, there have been 3 package bombs that detonated in Austin, two people killed so far. The bomber appears to be targeting the African-American community, although authorities haven't released any definitive links.)

[ related topics: Law Community Race ]

From the departments of "uuh", "unforeseen consequences" and "I do not think Wikipedia is as reliable as they do": YouTube will add information from Wikipedia to videos about conspiracies.

[ related topics: Conspiracy Government ]

Gun-trained teacher accidentally discharges firearm in California classroom, injuring student.

The weapon, which was not described, was pointed at the ceiling, according to a statement from the school, and debris fell from the ceiling.

Monterey County Weekly: Seaside teacher, councilman and reserve officer accidentally discharges weapon in gun safety demonstration.

I thought Common Core was supposed to protect against that...

Also, math is a hard subject...

(Okay, I'm also giggling over removing the target="_blank" from the link...)

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Current Events California Culture Guns ]

Just paid circa $250 each to order three 2x8x16s. Yes, they're Ipe, but dayumn!

Copied over from Facebook for posterity.

I've seen a number of the "walk up, not out" hashtag things referenced, and I'd like to take a little trip down memory lane.

In grade school, through high school, I was kind of a runt. Picked on and bullied a lot. Those of us who were outcast-ish tended to stick together, so, yes, I knew the people in high school who had Ruger 223s, and who'd done the appropriate hand-filing to make them fully automatic. I didn't go shooting with them because I had a sense of gun safety and I heard too many tales of accidental discharges to think that was a good idea, but come the Columbine shootings I thought "oh, yeah, those are my peeps and I know exactly which of my high school friends would have most likely been them".

Later in high school I discovered the print shop, which gave me some friends who were ... not of my socioeconomic class, and who were also more of the in crowd.

I forget why there was some protracted time out in front of the high school one day, but I was standing out there, and someone decided to threaten me with a knife. Two friends from print shop decided to casually put themselves in between the guy with the knife and me.

Someone else had seen the uncomfortable dynamic in the crowd and alerted an adult, and the school psychologist came over, completely misreading the situation, grabbed my two friends and threw them up against the wall.

You see, the problem wasn't the kids. The problem was that the bullies were working within the framework that the adults had set up and were maintaining. The bullies were just emulating the behavior they saw from the adult world around them.

There was a bright spot: At some point in my high school years we got a hip young principal in. I was skeptical, but it turned out he was somewhat for real...

Some months later, I had ridden my bicycle to school, came out to find that someone had completely kicked in my wheels. Just destroyed them. So I was out there trying to figure out what I was going to do, and he came by, and we exchanged a few words. In those words it became clear that we both knew exactly who the ringleader of the group that had destroyed my wheels was, that we didn't have any proof of who actually did the damage, and as we parted he asked me to, if I came up with such proof, tell him first rather than seeking revenge myself.

It was too late in my high school experience to make much of a difference, but all of a sudden there was an adult at the school who understood that there was violence boiling just under the surface at this high school in a relatively upscale area of suburban Connecticut, and who was an ally.

The school was Newtown High School. Newtown later became famous for ... well ... violence in schools.

I don't care what your stance on gun control or semi-automatic rifles with pseudo- mililtary stylings or whatever is, but please don't preach "walk up, not out" to kids: It's the adults who need to change to stop the bullying.

Blaming the victims of the system that the adults have created isn't gonna solve the problem.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Consumerism and advertising Work, productivity and environment Travel Guns Pedal Power Bicycling Woodworking ]

Space Force (1978)

[ related topics: Movies Space & Astronomy ]

Washington Post: Outlaw weed comes into the light — Humboldt County, the heart of California’s dark marijuana economy, is facing a new market force: legalization

[ related topics: Drugs Libertarian Invention and Design Sociology Law Current Events California Culture Economics ]

Washington Post: Made By History: How social media spread a historical lie

Kambree Kawahine Koa, whose bio identifies her as a “political news contributor,” scored big with her offering, which garnered almost 10,000 likes and close to 1,000 replies. “The Democrats created KKK,” she tweeted over a photo of a Klan march captioned: “This photo was taken at the 1924 Democratic Convention. It was known as the ‘Klanbake’ (just in case you want to Google it).”

The only problem? There was no Klan march at the 1924 Democratic convention — the photo was actually taken in Wisconsin — nor was the convention ever actually known as the “Klanbake.”

(However, in 1924 Time Magazine did refer to that year's Republican convention in Cleveland as "the Kleveland Konvention.)

[ related topics: Politics Photography moron Law Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Iowa judge admits hundreds of his rulings were ghost-written by attorneys, raising a host of ethical and fairness concerns:

While it’s not unusual for judges to ask attorneys to submit proposed decisions for their consideration, those requests are made in the open, and the attorneys’ work is labeled a "proposed decision" and made part of the public court file, separate from the judge's ruling.

But Jacobson, who retired from the bench in October at age 69, admitted in a deposition last fall that he sometimes privately requested that attorneys for the winning side write up the decision and then email it to him rather than file it with the clerk of courts as a "proposed decision."

[ related topics: Ethics Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment ]

A couple of coats of oil on the Ipe before I start working with it.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Two months of daily GTA causes “no significant changes” in behavior:

To correct for the "priming" effects inherent in these other studies, researchers had 90 adult participants play either Grand Theft Auto V or The Sims 3 for at least 30 minutes every day over eight weeks (a control group played no games during the testing period). The adults chosen, who ranged from 18 to 45 years old, reported little to no video game play in the previous six months and were screened for pre-existing psychological problems before the tests.

Nature: Molecular Psychiatry: Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study. doi:10.1038/s41380-018-0031-7

[ related topics: Games Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Nature and environment Video ]

Hmmm...

time openssl s_client -CApath /etc/ssl/certs/ -connect www.flutterby.com:443 - showcerts <<< ""

takes .1 seconds on my server, .577 seconds from home (weird? Maybe I don't have the CA chain on the home server?), but it takes ~1.7 seconds to serve the static index.html on both the server and from the home machine.

WTF is Apache doing with those extra 1.1+ seconds?

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source ]

Not endorsing, haven't read carefully, just transferring between computers: PBS: Inside the study showing conservatives retweeted Russian trolls 30 times more often than liberals

Lawrence Kestaloot: Ten reasons why I don't like Golang.

I looked a little bit at Go, saw that its performance numbers weren't great and went back to C++ (personal projects) and Python (where I have to work collaboratively) and Java (legacy code). It still intrigues me, but I think these are some interesting critiques...

On the other hand, on the collaborative C++ project I've got going I have been bad about coding styles, need to do some refactoring, and am not sure I mind having coding styles dictated by the language.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Theater & Plays Writing Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Python Woodworking ]

Motherboard: Why We're Not Calling the Cambridge Analytica Story a 'Data Breach'

In 2014, a researcher collected the data through an app that asked users to take a personality test for academic research purposes. Around 270,000 people agreed to have their data collected through the test, which its creator, Aleksandr Kogan, defined as “a very standard vanilla Facebook app.” But thanks to Facebook’s terms of service and its API at the time, the app was also able to collect data of their friends. This gave the researcher, who later handed the data to Cambridge Analytica, the raw information of more than 50 million people, according to the reports, which were largely based on the account of a former Cambridge Analytica data scientist.

Basically, Facebook was operating as designed. The problem from Facebook's point of view is that a hostile foreign government used the data rather than, say, your average marketing department. Facebook's complaint here is essentially that they were disintermediated in the ad marketing process.

The New York Times: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions, the Guardian: Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach

[ related topics: Politics Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design moron Current Events Consumerism and advertising Marketing New York ]

I've been thinking about what the successor to the web might look like, and I'm super excited by the possibilities of distributed filesystems, but I've wondered about the possibilities of denial of service attacks based in inserting illegal content, like child pornography, into such systems: If someone can convince you to browse to a link containing that content, it's then instantiated in your local copy and... issues, even more than ending up with something like that in your browser cache (which can also be done with images that aren't visible in the final web page) follow.

Looks like someone else has been thinking about this too: Child abuse imagery found within bitcoin's blockchain

“Our analysis shows that certain content, eg, illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal,” the researchers wrote. “Although court rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain illegal to possess for all users.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Graphics Television Artificial Intelligence ]

Trailer for Won't You Be My Neighbor?, the documentary from Focus Features on Fred Rogers and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. "In select theaters June 8", which I think means we're gonna go down to see it at The Rafael...

[ related topics: Movies ]

In Sacramento Calfornia, black man shot by police in his own back yard was carrying cellphone, not 'tool bar,' when he was shot, department says. Apparently someone in a helicopter doing surveillance misinterpreted his actions.

[ related topics: Current Events Law Enforcement Aviation - Helicopters ]

Death of the sampling theorem?

A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can reconstruct the aliased noise after sampling. Sounds crazy? Yes it is. I offer $1000 to the first person who proves otherwise. To collect your cool cash be sure to read to the end.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Education ]

Nimbus Data announces a 100TB SSD, to ship in June, with 5 year unlimited read/write guarantee.

Via PC Magazine 1

[ related topics: Current Events Machinery ]

Log message of the day (so far): "your mercy for graceful operations on workers is 60 seconds"

Gloria Brame: Kink-Blaming, BDSM-Shaming: How Religious Propaganda Corrupts Public Perception of BDSM

[ related topics: Religion ]

"django.db.connections is a dictionary-like object...", but you can't call "keys()" on it, because that would be too easy. Grrr.

[ related topics: Databases ]

New York Times: Bus Lane Blocked, He Trained His Computer to Catch Scofflaws

Now Mr. Bell is trying another tack — the 30-year-old computer scientist who lives in Harlem has created a prototype of a machine-learning algorithm that studies footage from a traffic camera and tracks precisely how often bike lanes are obstructed by delivery trucks, parked cars and waiting cabs, among other scofflaws. It is a piece of data that transportation advocates said is missing in the largely anecdotal discussion of how well the city’s bus and bike lanes do or do not work.

Source code at https://github.com/Bellspringsteen/OurCamera

Oh, and here's the author's version, just skip to this: Drivers Are Breaking the Law, Slowing Commutes and Endangering Lives. I Can Prove It — And Fix It.

Via JWZ: A rare use of CV for good instead of evil.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Open Source Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Machinery Community Education New York Bicycling Public Transportation ]

Ugh. The amount of time I've wasted today because the project uses jQuery so I didn't just go to using XMLHttpRequest directly... sigh.

QOTD, from this week's webshit weekly digest of "Hacker" "News" updates summarizing this thread:

Uber A/B tests vehicular manslaughter.

(About Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street)

[ related topics: Quotes Current Events Automobiles Gambling ]

Desexing the Kinsey Institute, about the new director and how the organization's mission and focus are changing:

Perhaps tellingly, Carter’s own research on vole monogamy has been cited by pro-abstinence and anti-pornography organizations to justify their positions. Physicians for Life, a pro-life association based in Alabama that also advocates for abstinence, uses Carter’s research to argue that monogamy is natural and built into our biology. They claim that sex out of wedlock will lead to a release of oxytocin that produces an expectation of commitment which is then disappointed, leading to “depression, dissatisfaction, and the disruption of future bonding potential.” Meanwhile, a website called Your Brain On Porn uses Carter’s oxytocin research to argue that strong pair bonds make us less likely to pursue addictive behaviors like porn-watching. Another anti-porn advocate uses Carter’s research to make a diametrically opposed argument: that oxytocin “bonds” men to porn and away from human partners.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Invention and Design Sociology Economics ]

The author of Cow Clicker: My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is drawing attention to malicious data thieves and brokers. But every Facebook app—even the dumb, innocent ones—collected users’ personal data without even trying.

[ related topics: Games History Handicaps & Disabilities ]

That feeling 2 hours after hanging out with friends at a coffee shop that the decaf mocha you ordered wasn't. Hopefully tonight will be productive...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Craigslist ends personal ads:

US Congress just passed HR 1865, "FOSTA", seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully.

Any tool or service can be misused. We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.

To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!

A reminder that the female homicide rate dropped after Craigslist launched its erotic services platform. FOSTA is anti-woman.

Craigslist’s Effect on Violence Against Women Scott Cunningham, Baylor University; Gregory DeAngelo, West Virginia University; John Tripp, Baylor University.

[ related topics: Politics Erotic Education Real Estate ]

Had a jury summons this week, never got called in. Kinda bummed that I rescheduled a dentist appointment and everything and missed the jury experience. I actually generally find it informative and cool to at least get to the courtroom.

Literal LOL from the latest This Kaiju Life, narrated by @nobilis. Start at the beginning... http://kaiju.libsyn.com/

That feeling when two dimensions that are supposed to be the same, in wood, over a span of about 16', actually measure out to within less than 1/16"! Woohoo!

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Those side board are probably 50 lbs each, 7 tenons per end. And somehow I got it together...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Now to shim it level and lag bolt it into place... And then screw down the tracks for the cover.

[ related topics: Photography Fabrication ]

The track is a bit sticky, I've been working that out, but the rain started so I decided to call it for the evening

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Just read "baseline", but in my head it was pronounced like "vaseline", and now I don't know what's real any more.

Gizmodo: AggregateIQ Created Cambridge Analytica's Election Software, and Here’s the Proof. Wow, the tangled web here:

Roughly a week before the EU referendum, Vote Leave inexplicably donated £625,000 to a young fashion design student named Darren Grimes, the founder of a small, unofficial Brexit campaign called BeLeave. According to a BuzzFeed investigation, Grimes immediately gave a “substantial amount” of the cash he received from Vote Leave to AIQ. Vote Leave also donated £100,000 to another Leave campaign called Veterans for Britain, which, according to The Guardian, then paid AggregateIQ precisely that amount.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Graphic Design Fashion ]

I'm up in the air about some of the policy proposals I've seen related to March for our Lives, but it's interesting to see what it has come to mean to various people. Some of what Rob talks about here brought memories of my own grade school experience... T.Rob: Big thanks for March for our Lives:

Being autistic, social media had been a refuge for me. The place where I was able to find community and be part of someone’s “us” group. That ended with the campaign and the total abandonment of any civility of discourse. No matter how well researched and reasoned my argument, I was a “libtard,” a “snowflake,” a “cuck” and worse. When I reported a Facebook group advocating incarceration or murder of all autistic people, jailing or killing people like me in other words, Facebook’s initial response was that it didn’t violate their Terms of Service. Contempt had become the new normal.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Journalism and Media Community ]

ViperCard is an in-browser HyperCard clone. If your '80s flashbacks need more black and white compute in them...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Race ]

Huge thanks to Rachel at the Vallejo Times Herald for this feature on the Vallejo Pioneers square dance club. Come dance with us! http://www.timesheraldonline.c...-free-starter-lessons-next-month

[ related topics: Current Events ]

Matthew Green on Twitter points to a report that says that the FBI had the techniques to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone even while testifying to congress that they needed a back door from Apple.

Office of the Inspector General: U.S. Department of Justice — A Special Inquiry Regarding the Accuracy of FBI Statements Concerning its Capabilities to Exploit an iPhone Seized During the San Bernardino Terror Attack Investigation (PDF)

[ related topics: Apple Computer Politics Law Enforcement iPhone ]

Usenix HotOS XV: Scalability! But at what COST? Frank McSherry, Michael Isard, Derek G. Murray:

In this paper we take several recent graph processing papers from the systems literature and compare their reported performance against simple, single-threaded implementations on the same datasets using a high-end 2014 laptop. Perhaps surprisingly, many published systems have unbounded COST—i.e., no configuration outperforms the best single-threaded implementation—for all of the problems to which they have been applied

[ related topics: Ziffle Theater & Plays Conferences ]

The Ready Player One backlash, explained — The Ready Player One book used to be considered a fun romp. Then Gamergate happened.

I read the book, enjoyed it, though many of the cultural references were actually a bit after my time, but as the hype machine for the movie has been ramping up and other people in my social circles have been discovering the book, I'm looking at it more critically.

[ related topics: Books Movies Sociology California Culture ]

Meanwhile, in Questionable Content land, Brun is also me: http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3707

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

Exposure to Opposing Views can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Social Media:

There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political po- larization by creating “echo chambers” that insulate people from opposingviews about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats andRepublicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range ofsocial policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to atreatment condition in which they were offered financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for one month that exposed them to messages produced by elected officials, organizations, and other opinion leaders with opposing political ideologies. Respondents were re-surveyed at the end of the month to measurethe effect of this treatment, and at regular intervals throughout the study pe-riod to monitor treatment compliance. We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment,and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-treatment. These findings have important implications for the interdisciplinary literature on political polarization as well as the emerging field of computational social science.

[ related topics: Politics moron Journalism and Media ]

Blockchain, baby! An immutable ledger of everything you've done...

Researchers figure out how to de-anonymize Monero.

The researchers' paper, which will be presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July, takes special note of a period starting in July 2016, when Monero was first adopted as an alternative to Bitcoin by the then-largest dark web black market for drugs, AlphaBay, and ending in February 2017, when Monero completed an upgrade to its privacy protections known as Ring Confidential Transactions. Roughly 200,000 Monero transactions occurred during that period, the researchers point out, many of which likely involved purchases of illegal narcotics or other sensitive payments made by users who believed their payments were fully untraceable.

Although even transactions made after that patch are still vulnerable, if less so...

[ related topics: Drugs Interactive Drama Privacy Health tolkien Economics ]

Forget Facebook, Russian agents have been pretending to be furries on Tumblr

It’s fun to laugh at the idea of the Russians trying to mimic the syntax and obsessions of Tumblr teens but it’s clear they saw the site as another conduit for disruption and division. To have legitimate campaigns such as Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights efforts undermined is a huge issue.

Related: Life on the Swingset #317: The Polyamorous Furry Community w/ Viro the Science Collie & Metriko Oni had some discussion of policing Nazis out of the furry community...

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Civil Liberties Community Dogs Woodworking ]

Former professional clown running for Congress in South Carolina. So... trying to get back into the business?

Hat tip to Tara.

[ related topics: Politics Sports Clowns ]

Washington Post: Why the costs could go way up to ship anything. Short version: ELDs (Electronic Logging Devices) become mandatory for commercial vehicles that travel over 150 miles a day on April 1st. The article is has a number of small businesses crying excessive regulation, but... this means that dispatchers won't be able to screw over drivers by pushing them to make time on impossible routes.

So, yeah, the cost is gonna come from actually keeping drivers to sane schedules.

[ related topics: Current Events Machinery ]

A good reminder: There’s never been a safer time to be a kid in America

(Via Larry)

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events ]

How A Free-Speech Advocate Accidentally Became the Face of Censorship in Porn — Paul Cambria was just trying to help the porn industry. Instead, his list of sex acts to avoid became a guide for prosecutors

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Free Speech Douglas Adams ]

If homeownership is the American Dream, why do we mostly build rental apartments? Pretty California-centric, but a good look at why we favor detached single family for purchase, and why we don't build as many condos as we could.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology Consumerism and advertising California Culture Real Estate ]

When I hit this part of my Thursday run I like to think that I'm chasing a many-footed creature who's dragging a tail...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Morning rower while I was on my run...

[ related topics: Photography ]

McSweeney's: Excerpts from my upcoming novel, Ready Player Two: Girl Stuff, by Nat Silverman

Raven The Pirate Princess is sinking. Looks like it might be a fun series.

The story unfolded slowly: Five dead after car plunges off cliff along Mendocino Coast, CHP says.

And then news that Local woman killed in crash along with family members pleaded guilty to assault, CPS visited home 3 times, identified children as 'potential victims of abuse or neglect'.

And then Answers elusive in Mendocino Coast crash that killed family of 5; 3 children still missing:

The mystery has garnered widespread attention — in part because of the death toll and ages of the victims — but also because the family became something of a media sensation in 2014, when Devonte was photographed hugging a police officer at a Portland protest in response to the police shooting of a black man in Ferguson, Mo.

A Twitter thread with a black perspective on this: RT SJW Movie Reviews @sjw_movies:

We need to talk about white women. Specifically the sort who collect children of colour like accesories via transracial adoption, using them as props, and then abusing or even kill them.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Movies Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Automobiles Race ]

CityLab: The Real Cost of Luring Big Companies to Town:

New research from Timothy J. Bartik, an economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute, suggests that while incentives do indeed have benefits for local economic development in the short term, negative effects begin compounding as soon as 22 years into an agreement. It’s public education that suffers most drastically from budgetary reshuffling; and vulnerable low-income populations that are afforded the smallest gains.

But, of course, 22 years is long enough that the politicians who sold out their communities have received the accolades for the long-term costs.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Community Education Economics ]

Student shot at school gets detention for taking part in school- shooting protest:

Caffrey, now 16, was one of two students shot and two others injured during the resulting confusion Feb. 29, 2016, when James “Austin” Hancock, now 17, stole a gun from his great-grandmother, brought it to school in his backpack and ultimately used it at lunchtime. The other student shot, Cameron Smith, was hit in the back and unable to walk for weeks, according to his grandmother.

I think his dad has got exactly the correct attitude about it:

“The whole purpose of a walkout is to protest against an establishment,” Marty Caffrey wrote on Facebook. “I do not expect the establishment to support the walkout.”

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Children and growing up Current Events Civil Liberties Guns ]

Hmmm... I Kill Giants looks like my kind of movie. I Kill Giants director Anders Walter on making a likable fantasy with a hateful protagonist

[ related topics: Erotic Movies ]

Iowa woman who tried to vote for Trump twice gets two years probation, $750 fine.

Texas woman who didn't realize she was ineligible to vote until the rest of her probation was served gets 5 years in jail.

No points for guessing the respective colors of the skin of each of those people.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy Current Events Community Aviation - Helicopters ]

Not the biggest boat I've seen in the turning basin, but nothing's going on in town this weekend...

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

A Scientist Didn’t Disclose Important Data—and Let Everyone Believe a Popular Weedkiller Causes Cancer — A World Health Organization group called RoundUp a “probable carcinogen,” but it didn’t have all the facts.

When Mother Jones is callin' you out for junk science against Monsanto, you know something's wrong...

[ related topics: Health Nature and environment ]

Using Chosen Names Reduces Odds of Depression and Suicide in Transgender Youths

Earlier research by Russell found that transgender youths report having suicidal thoughts at nearly twice the rate of their peers, with about 1 out of 3 transgender youths reporting considering suicide. In the new study, having even one context in which a chosen name could be used was associated with a 29 percent decrease in suicidal thoughts. The researchers controlled for personal characteristics and social support.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Invention and Design Current Events ]

Sonoma West Times: A most Direct Public Offer

We are asking members of the community to become investors and partners in this newspaper. You can now buy shares, support community journalism and make a modest profit with an annual three percent stockholder dividend.

Officially, this is called a Direct Public Offer and we have been certified by the State of California. Other types of businesses and nonprofits have implemented DPOs, but we will be the first print newspaper in America to do so.

[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media California Culture Community ]